As President-elect Donald Trump takes office today, January 20, 2017. the Pew Research Center reports “the public has starkly different expectations about which groups in society will gain influence – and those that will lose influence – under his administration.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) say wealthy people will gain influence in Washington when Trump takes office. Just 8% say they will lose influence, while 27% expect the wealthy will not be affected.”

I agree with the 27 percent who say the wealthy will not be affected. The reason is simple. The rich already control both major political parties, and through them, the rich control the federal government, virtually all state governments, and most big city governments, as well as a lot of local governments.

The wealthy are not going to improve upon that score a whole lot under Trump. Control of the legislative process has been the primary means by which the 1 percent has methodically increased its share of wealth and income of the United States year after year for the last thirty-five years.

That’s why the 64 percent who say wealthy people will gain influence are wrong inasmuch as wealthy people have so much power they can’t possibly gain anymore.

The difference is that those rich folks who use the Democratic Party as a vehicle to control the mechanisms of government and to profit via those mechanisms, have lost influence. Think Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates and other Democratic Party billionaires. Their rivals who control the Republican Party will gain influence at their expense.

Those Republican billionaires include Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Charles and David Koch, hedge fund managerz Paul Singer and Robert Mercer, and a lot of other Wall Street investors.

Together, the billionaire Democrats and billionaire Republicans form a kind of good old boy network with some rivalries among them. They also control the media in such a way as to ensure we don’t see this, although it’s pretty obvious.

What are the most stark differences between the administration of President Obama and the incoming president Donald Trump?

Wall Street’s Citigroup runs the white house under Obama, and would likely have done so under Hillary Clinton. Under Trump, Citigroup is out and Goldman Sachs is in. What a difference! Wall Street elites are still going to be determining US economic policy, which primarily consists of plots to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent.

In other words, under Trump hope and change sound a lot like the same old failed policies Wall Street has been using to weaken the US economy by killing the middle class.

Wall Street powerhouse Citigroup played a powerful role in shaping Obama’s economic agenda, which meant pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would’ve lead to the exporting of millions of US jobs.

Michael Froman, now Obama’s U.S. trade representative, was an executive at Citigroup. On October 6 2008, he wrote an email to John Podesta, then co-chair of Obama’s transition team. The subject was “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

In other words, Wall Street was calling all the shots in the Obama administration.

President-elect Trump so far has tapped former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Steven Mnuchin (a co-investor with hedge fund billionaire George Soros) to be his Treasury secretary and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross to lead the Commerce Department. Trump even met with Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn inside Trump Tower this week.

In the days following these announcements, shares of all the big Wall Street firms climbed, with Goldman Sachs rising more than 3 percent by noon in New York.

So it appears Goldman Sachs and billionaire investors other than Citigroup are going to be running the show in the White House. Now that’s not a whole lot of change.

Below is a Trump presidential advertisement that blamed Wall Street for wrecking havoc with the US economy, and now he has embraced everything they have stood for.

The corporate wing of the US Supreme Court, a commodity purchased by the Koch Brothers long ago, is likely going to hand down the Koch Brothers influenced, or ordered, decision against public employee unions, just as it destroyed legal precedents with its Koch Brothers influenced, or ordered, decision in the Citizen’s United case. The Koch Brothers wing of the court include Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and sometimes Anthony Kennedy. To be fair, the Warren Buffett/George Soros wing of the US Supreme Court are the remaining justices.

The object of their decision, of course, is to tip the scales of justice more and more into the hands of their billionaire backers, and away from legal precedents, the Constitution, and the vast majority of US citizens, and the Democratic Party.

The case is simple enough in the soon to be decided Friedrichs v California teachers Association case. Some union members don’t enjoy paying union dues, but they enjoy the benefits of union/management negotiations. So they want a free ride.

“Earlier this month the justices heard oral arguments in the case that turns on the so-called no-free-lunch provision of the union contract in a school district near Anaheim, Calif. It requires teachers to pay a portion of the union’s dues even if they choose not to join. Several teachers sued, claiming that violates their First Amendment rights. Unions take political positions, the teachers noted, with which they might not agree.

By the union’s logic, all teachers benefit from the salary scale it negotiates. So shouldn’t all have to pay their share of the cost of negotiating a contract? Can’t the free-speech issue can be addressed by giving nonmembers a discount — subtracting an amount proportional to what the union spends on political activities?”

The plaintiff, Rebecca “Freeride” Friedrichs doesn’t even want to pay that trivial fee. So she was mysteriously discovered by a billionaire organization, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), according to PRWatch.

“The NRTWC has deep connections within the national right-wing network led by the Koch brothers. Reed Larson, who led the national right to work groups for over three decades, hails from Wichita, Kansas, the hometown of Charles and David Koch. Larson became an early leader of the right-wing John Birch Society in Kansas, which Fred Koch (the father of Charles and David) helped found. Several other founders and early leaders of the NRTWC were members and leaders of the John Birch Society, specifically the Wichita chapter of which Fred Koch was an active member.

The groups remain tied to the Kochs. In 2012, the Kochs’ Freedom Partners group funneled $1 million to the National Right to Work Committee, while the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave a $15,000 grant to the NRTWLDF, which has also received significant funding from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Today, at least three former Koch associates work as attorneys for the NRTWLDF.”

One can rightly suspect the Koch Brothers and their buddies are going after public sector labor unions because those unions largely support Democratic Party candidates. On the national level, Koch Brothers rivals, such as billionaire hedge fund managers Warren Buffett and George Soros, largely control what the Democratic Party does legislatively.

However, the result of this battle between billionaire titans is another nail in the coffin of the middle class, with the weakening of labor unions if Justice Kennedy decides in favor of the Koch Brothers, which means Rebecca Friedrichs has allowed herself to be just another brick in the wall of this never-ending struggle.

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and A People Betrayed

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed

Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.